How to Run a Beer Pong Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Beer pong's appeal is that anyone can throw a ball into a cup, but the long-range, last-cup pressure shot is genuinely hard — so a club night is welcoming to total beginners and still has a competitive edge for regulars. Get the kit and the room right and the rest is easy.

Table and venue

A regulation beer pong table is 8ft long by 2ft wide (about 2.4m by 0.6m), roughly waist height, with a 10-cup triangle racked at each end. You don't strictly need a purpose-built table — a sturdy trestle, a folded-down dining table or even a length of decorating board on two stands works fine for a social night — but a dedicated foldable table with painted cup positions makes setup quicker and the night look the part. In the UK that usually means a back room of a pub, a student union space, a community hall or someone's well-protected games room. Lock in a recurring slot first: a fixed "Thursday 8pm" does more for retention than any amount of marketing.

Negotiate a quiet weeknight slot with a venue that wants the bar trade — beer pong fills a slow Tuesday or Thursday better than almost anything — and ask whether you can store the tables and a box of kit on-site. Folding tables in and out of your car boot every week is the fastest way to resent your own club. Lay down a wipeable cloth or get tables with a moulded surface, because the one universal truth of beer pong is that it spills.

Equipment

You need: one or more tables, a bag of standard 16oz disposable cups (the red "Solo"-style cups are the default, and consistent cup size matters because rack geometry depends on it), a generous supply of ping-pong balls (they go astray, get stood on and roll under the sofa — buy them by the gross), a rinse cup of clean water per table for dunking balls between throws, kitchen roll and a bin for the mess, and a first aid kit. The balls matter most: nothing kills momentum like the whole room hunting for the last one under the pool table. Buy far more than you think you need.

On the drink itself: most clubs run on beer, but plenty fill the cups with water and keep the drinking separate (or run alcohol-free) so the night is about the throwing, not the downing. That's a sensible default for a mixed or competitive club — and it keeps you on the right side of responsible-drinking expectations (see the legal section).

Format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get matched into doubles, rotate through games — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (a ranked round robin, a bracket knockout, a box league over a season). Most thriving beer pong clubs lean on a casual round robin to make sure everyone gets a fair run of games, then layer a proper tournament or league on top once they know who the regulars are.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Beer pong has a huge latent audience — almost everyone has played it at a party — so your challenge is less "convince people the game is fun" and more "give them a regular, well-run version of a thing they already enjoy".

Where to recruit

• Your own venue. The warmest audience is the people already drinking in the pub or bar you play in. A poster by the bar, a table left set up where people can see it, and a landlord who mentions the night does more than any advert. Start here.
• Student unions and societies. Beer pong is practically a fixture of university social life. A society sign-up stall, a flyer in halls, or a slot at a freshers' fair fills a roster fast.
• Local Facebook groups. "What's on in [town]" and community pages convert well for a casual weeknight. A photo of a packed table and "every Thursday 8pm, doubles, beginners welcome, balls provided" gets replies the same evening.
• Other pub-game crowds. Pool, darts, table-tennis and quiz-night regulars are your exact demographic — sociable, regular, already in the right buildings. A flyer at the pool night before yours is a warm, low-effort lead.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and fill in a paper sign-up sheet on arrival. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the roster, shows the next night, and lets them pay if they want to commit. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it, enter their name, and they're in — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to update. Stick it on the poster by the bar so a curious drinker can join in the time it takes you to rack a fresh triangle.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Beer pong clubs often run on a smaller budget than court sports — there's no expensive hall hire — but cups and balls aren't free, and a season-end tournament needs a prize pot. There are three models worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session

Players pay a small fee — say £2–£4 — each time they come, covering cups, balls and the table. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, easy for one-off guests, no awkward subscription conversations. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing coins in a tin on the night is the most thankless job in club running.

Monthly membership

A fixed monthly fee covering unlimited nights. Pros: smooth, predictable income and less per-session admin. Cons: it doesn't suit students or sporadic players, who'll feel they're overpaying — and beer pong's crowd skews casual, so a pure subscription rarely fits.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted monthly or annual sub for regulars, plus a guest rate for one-off players. Best of both worlds — and given how many beer pong newcomers want to "just try it", a guest rate is essential. The only complication is tracking who's on which plan, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your real costs: a sleeve of cups and a fresh batch of balls per night, plus anything you're putting toward a season prize pot. Divide by a realistic attendance number (not your aspirational one) and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £3 instead of £2.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a beer pong club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a night that feels fair

This is where a beer pong club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. Players forgive a wobbly table or a warm pint. They do not forgive standing around watching the same two pairs hog the only table for an hour while everyone else waits.

The queue

The pub default — "winner stays on, losers off" — works but rewards whoever's already at the table and quietly punishes newcomers who don't know whose go is next. A digital queue fixes that: pairs tap to join from a phone, see their position, and get called when a table frees up. Nobody can skip the line. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Matchmaking and scoring

Beer pong uses points scoring, and the simplest fair way to run a night is the round robin format: pairs are drawn into games, everyone plays a set run of opponents, and you log each game's result so the standings build automatically. Score it on cups sunk — a clean win is removing all ten of the opponents' cups, and if you're playing timed or to a target you rank by cups left. ClubLono is set up for beer pong with points scoring and round robin as the default format, so the host logs results and the table ranks itself.

Fair matchmaking is the single biggest factor in retention. A beginner pair against two sharpshooters who clear the rack in four throws stops coming back; strong players who only get easy games get bored. ClubLono's built-in rating (we call it HLR) updates per game so groupings and partner draws stay sensible without you doing mental arithmetic between racks.

Rotation

Set the game rule explicitly before you start — full rack of ten cups, whether you're playing reracks (re-forming the remaining cups into a tighter shape on request), and whether there's a "redemption" last-cup comeback. Without a stated rule, a single drawn-out grudge match leaves a queue of people watching for twenty minutes. Keep games to a sensible length and the rotation keeps moving; ClubLono handles the scoring and standings so you can play instead of refereeing a clipboard.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: ten cups in a triangle each end, you take turns throwing two balls a side, sink a ball in a cup and that cup is removed, first to clear all the opponents' cups wins. Don't drown them in elbow rules and reracks on night one — the core loop plus a friendly partner is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and with beer pong's churn of curious one-timers, it's where the real work is.

Communicate in one place

If night reminders live in a WhatsApp group, cancellations in a Facebook event and the social plans in someone's camera-roll chat, members will miss things. Pick one channel for everything. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every player on the roster is automatically in it, and booked players get a thread for their specific night so last-minute messages ("table's moved to the back room") reach the right people, not all 60 members at once.

Schedule nights ahead

"Same time every week" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, including the weeks you're not running because the venue is booked. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits, and members get a push notification when something new opens — no separate Facebook event needed, no "is it on tonight?" texts at 7pm.

Add a competitive layer

Once you have regulars, a monthly ranked night or a season-long box league gives people something to climb. Beer pong has a natural drama to it — the last-cup pressure shot, the comeback from 1–8 down — and a leaderboard turns that into a story people want to be part of. Keep the casual round robin as the welcoming front door, and let the competition sit alongside it for those who want it.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section. Beer pong is unusual among the sports on this platform in that it has no formal UK national governing body — there's no equivalent of Badminton England to affiliate to, just commercial leagues and one-off tournament organisers. That means you can't rely on an NGB affiliation to hand you a ready-made insurance policy or safeguarding template; you'll need to arrange the basics yourself.

Insurance and the venue

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running organised sessions, and most pubs, unions and halls require it as a condition of booking. With no governing body to bundle cover, either get a standalone public-liability policy from a sports-and-social-club insurer, or — more often for beer pong — run under the venue's own licence and insurance as their event. Confirm in writing what the venue's policy covers and what it expects of you, and make sure they hold the relevant alcohol licence if real drink is involved.

Responsible drinking and safeguarding

This is the part a beer pong club has to take more seriously than most. Set a clear over-18s only rule if alcohol is in play, never pressure anyone to drink, make water cups a normal and unremarkable choice, and keep the night about the throwing rather than the downing. If you run any session involving under-18s, do it alcohol-free, appoint a safeguarding lead and write a short policy. Have a plan for getting people home safely. None of this is heavy lifting, but a drinking game without these basics is a liability waiting to happen.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails or phone numbers you're a data controller. In practice: have a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

If you take more than a trivial amount of money, open a separate bank account for the club. Mixing club fees with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult committee meeting two years from now.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person setting up the tables, hunting the balls and chasing the cup money gets tired and quits. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputy hosts who can set up tables, rack cups, take the queue and lock up when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment collection, night reminders, the queue, refunds on cancellation — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your head, it falls over the moment you're on holiday.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — venue contact, where the tables and kit are stored, the Stripe login, the house rules on reracks and redemption — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small beer pong club on a group chat, a coin tin and "winner stays on". Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job at 80 — especially once you're running a season tournament with a table to keep.

Dedicated club software collapses four tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The roster stops being a sign-up sheet and becomes self-serve via a QR code.
• Fees stop being chased in a coin tin and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• The queue stops being "whose go is it?" and becomes a phone-based list nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat.
• Nights become a published calendar with capacity limits and automatic refunds when you cancel.

ClubLono is £0/month for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, round-robin scoring, nights, chat, capacity and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions, the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode for a venue tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing. Premium pays for itself once a club is doing roughly £500/month in paid sessions on monthly billing, and there's no point at which it costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a regular crowd of beer pong players who'd rather be at the table than counting coins.